Queensland’s last leper colony reveals its secrets

It was a shattering diagnosis – that turned out to be wrong. Yet this young mother spent 12 harrowing years in isolation on Peel Island leper colony.

By Alison Brown

July 7, 2018

A young wife with two toddlers had been unwell for months. Tired and with worrisome brown marks on her body, Phyllis Ebbage made the trip from her home in Ayr to see a tropical doctor in Townsville almost 90 kilometres away.

She never got to say goodbye to her daughters. She thought she would be gone two days.

Without ever receiving a clear diagnosis of leprosy, she was forced to spend 12 years on Peel Island — a leper colony off the south-east Queensland coast.

Her haunting story is retold, in her own voice, at the State Library’s new Islands exhibition. She shares how she felt about being sent to this remote place and the conditions she faced.

“But they were making arrangements for me to go in a plane from Townsville.

“The day I left, I didn’t say goodbye to the girls.

“I thought I’d be back in a day or two. And I was going to take them to school.

“That night, on a Sunday night, dear granddad Ebbage comes, and there were relations all around the room.

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“And the next thing, granddad said: ‘You got it.'

“'No', I said - 'No! No! No!'

“I couldn’t say no more.”

Phyllis was flown to Brisbane and taken on the 11-kilometre boat journey to Peel Island, which sits off the coast of Cleveland. The journey took more than four hours.

“I could see buildings but I didn’t know what they were for,” she says.

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“And then they showed me where to go to my hut.

It was so primitive. Oh god, there was nothing.

“It was a terrible place.

“It was so primitive. Oh god, there was nothing. And it was only fortnightly visits.''

Many of the men and women transported to Peel Island never saw their families again because the leprosy sufferers were disowned out of shame. Some patients died on the island.

“I didn’t have the right treatment then. I tried a lot of treatments there, nearly killed me,'' she says.

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“Penicillin — I had three lots of it and nearly died.

“One night, I was going down to get another lot of it. I nearly collapsed on the way. So I wouldn’t take it no more. I had taken too much.”

The exhibition shows how Peel Island enforced isolation from the main population and the legislation allowed authorities to remove anyone who was suspected of or diagnosed with leprosy, including taking children from school without their parents’ knowledge or permission.

Phyllis Ebbage spent more than a decade sleeping in a bed like this on Peel Island.Credit:Courtesy of Museum of Brisbane

Conditions on the island were grim. In the early days of its operation, Peel Island was more like a prison than a medical isolation facility for the sick.

Patients were put into bark huts with dirt floors and treated almost like convicts. Some patients were locked up or chained by police before they were taken to the site.

Each compound was surrounded by fences almost 2.5m high to prevent ethnic groups mixing, particularly at night.

Thanks to the careful restoration of old cassette tapes with the recordings of Phyllis's memories, State Library curators were able to preserve her first-hand account of the chilling experience. It has been added to the exhibition’s digital story.

She thought she’d see her girls again in a couple of days. So she didn’t say goodbye properly.

“Back then, there was a huge stigma, Phyllis’s family didn’t know how to handle it,” curator Anna Thurgood says.

“One of the really sad things is she was to be flown from Townsville to Brisbane and taken to Peel Island, but she didn’t know.

“She didn’t know how long she’d be gone.

"She thought she would see her girls again in a couple of days. So she didn't say goodbye properly. It wasn't until she got to Brisbane, her father-in-law told her she had leprosy and that she'd be taken to Peel Island."

Phyllis wouldn’t see her children until 1948 – eight years after she was transported to the island in Moreton Bay.

Visits were restricted to once a fortnight for just 30 minutes. The only way to access the island was by taking the government’s steamboat. A round-trip took eight or nine hours and no children were allowed.

Joan Bruce, a specialist librarian in the State Library’s Queensland Memory team, was the person who accidentally uncovered Phyllis’s cassette in a cabinet. After playing it, she realised the team had a historic treasure in their hands.

She explains how Phyllis’s husband got around the visiting restrictions.

“He got jack of this and bought himself a boat and visited her secretly and brought the girls to see her,” she says.

“We have photographs of her sitting on said boat, in the daytime.”

Phyllis Ebbage soaking up the sunshine away from the grim conditions on Peel Island.Credit:State Library of Queensland

In her recordings, Phyllis reveals she offered to divorce her husband because she thought she’d be on Peel Island forever. But his devotion never wavered.

The Ebbages had several secret rendezvous on Les’s boat before the island authorities spotted them and reported them to police.

There was a water police chase, which ended with Les being charged and fined 10 pounds.

His escapades were reported by Brisbane newspapers at the time and the archived articles, many of them carrying poignant handwritten annotations by his daughter Verree, form part of the exhibition.

People didn’t know how bad things were for the patients over there.

“After that, there was a public sympathy campaign that created a mood for change,” Ms Thurgood says.

“I think it was a turning point in the public’s perception of Peel Island.

“Until then, people didn’t know how bad things were for the patients over there.”

Not long after, the government launched a program to rebuild some of the huts and improve conditions for patients.

Phyllis Ebbage reunited with her daughters Verree and Desley. Credit:State Library of Queensland

The family was reunited for good in 1951, more than a decade after Phyllis was first dispatched to Peel Island from her north Queensland home.

Phyllis’s release was bitter-sweet. The revelation she may have been returning negative results all along while still incarcerated on the island was almost too much for her to bear.

“It was something I don’t think Phyllis ever got over, it was such a big thing in her life,” Ms Thurgood says.

“You can tell that from the way she talks about it in the oral history when she was speaking in her 80s.

“She kept asking staff on the island why they wouldn’t let her go. She remembered that one of the people in charge told her she needed to get her husband to stop. Because he was campaigning. He was writing letters to newspapers and politicians. He kept it up for years.”

Phyllis was released shortly after her husband stopped complaining, according to the curators.

The picturesque Peel Island's dark history is explored in the new exhibition at the State Library of Queensland.Credit:Tourism and Events Queensland

Since the quarantine station closed down in 1959, the squalid huts patients were forced to live in have been restored by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service.

Despite the island’s pristine natural beauty — it is home to 74 bird species — access to the old quarantine site is tightly controlled.

Overnight visits are available only to members of the Friends of Peel Island, who arrange monthly working bees subject to weather conditions. Even then, they must travel by ferry to One Mile on Stradbroke Island, and then onto Peel Island via a small vessel that seats six volunteers.

However, Teerk Roo Ra (Peel Island) National Park is open to the public as far as Horseshoe Bay and Platypus Bay and has popular boating spots with some campsites. Permits are needed for camping.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, past attempts to turn the former leper colony into holiday camp never came to fruition.

Islands: Hidden Histories from Queensland Islands is at the State Library until January 27, 2019. The library would like to speak to Phyllis Ebbage's descendants so if you know more, emailscoop@brisbanetimes.com.au.